Boost your energy with these three simple steps.

I want more energy! I want more energy to do the stuff I like to do, like:

Spending time with my wife and our 13-year-old (even if he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with us.)

Working out! Sometimes, I just don’t feel like I have the juice to work out.

Writing, blogging and educating our members and fans. Trust me on this one (unless your a writer, in which case, the struggle bus is real), writing takes a lot of energy. To create a clear message that gets the point across without being verbose and aloof…it’s hard.

Helping more people. I want to help as many people as I can, and when you’re dealing with people all day long in personal training sessions and in the gym, it can really zap your energy.

Finally…I want to have more energy to spend time on myself. Every fit and healthy person that I KNOW (and I know a lot of them! Plus, they all aren’t just personal trainers) understands that to have that status they must invest time on themselves. I would go so far as to say 50% of your time should be spent on yourself if you want to be healthy and fit. That’s not that much considering you should be sleeping for a third of the day.

Rare pic of the kid smiling.

You know what…I am not alone either. I would go so far as to say EVERYONE wants more energy to do the things they want to do. They usually turn to gallons of coffee, 5-hour energy shots, monster energy drinks, etc. Because those things give you energy!

Spoiler alert – they actually don’t give you energy. That “buzz” you feel is caused by a lot of different things, but most noticeably caffeine increases the production of catecholamines and glucocorticoids…or what you would know as cortisol and adrenaline. This, in turn, tricks you into thinking you have more energy when in reality, it’s just your body responding to an “upper”. Not a GREAT idea if you’re already stressed out, operating on low levels of sleep and not getting enough food. This can lead to a host of different health problems like – adrenal fatigue, weight gain, thyroid dysfunction, etc.

“Have more energy” is almost ALWAYS on that list of three. In fact, it’s often number 1.

I recently sat down with a female member for a check in (yes…we like to check in with our members as much as possible, how else can we make sure they are happy?). We will call her, Betty. Betty is a mother of two young kids, works part-time, married to a husband that works for himself, weighs about 155 lbs, 5’7″, and is in her late 30’s. There’s some context for you. That’s probably a lot of you reading this right now!

She said she wanted to have more energy, I asked her what is she eating. Betty replied (this is actually copied right out of my notes):

Breakfast – 2 hardboiled eggs, banana or one hard-boiled egg a cheese stick and a banana

Lunch – salad with a protein with balsamic dressing with a little cheese. Protein is usually small chicken breast.

Snack – apple with peanut butter

Dinner – Porkchop, or some other piece of protein with side salad sometimes rice

After dinner snack – maybe 3 times per week – a bowl of chips, something salty.

Generally, eats more food on Saturday and Sunday because they usually go out to dinner. She eats the whole plate, will generally ask for double vegetables.

Drinks a few glasses of wine per week – “Can I drink more wine?”

Um…generally no.

I asked her if she felt like she was eating enough food, her reply was yes. I asked her if she would be willing to eat more food…her reply was, of course, I don’t want to gain weight.

Understandable and totally logical.

I asked her what exactly is food? Why do we need to eat it? What does it do for us? She immediately fired back – “it’s energy.”

Light bulb moment!

Food is energy people. No food = no energy. A calorie is simply a unit of energy your body uses to perform work. More calories = more energy to burn = ability to do more work (or spend more quality time with your loved ones instead of just crashing on the couch). But, the struggle with eating more food does pose a very real threat of gaining weight. So, how do you eat more food to boost your energy WITHOUT gaining weight?

Follow these three simple steps!

Lean protein. Lean protein is a great way to boost your energy without adding a lot of body weight.

Fruits and veggies. Fruits and veggies are TERRIFIC at giving you some energy. Plus, they are very low calorie, but very nutrient dense. Sometimes people lack energy because they don’t have enough B vitamins in their diet. Fruits and veggies are great sources of those B vitamins.

Chew real food. Yep…seems pretty easy right? Chewing food will actually give you some energy. Have you ever felt tired and started chomping on some gum and immediately felt more energized? It’s tough to feel sleepy when you’re chewing something. I say real food because real food needs to be chewed. You don’t need to chew yogurt, cheese or bread (to name a few processed foods) very much. But you bite into an apple or carrots or a hamburger and you absolutely need to chew that in order to get it down.

There ya have it! Some easy ways to boost your energy without gaining weight. Plus, I would go so far as to say, if you have been trying to lose weight for a long period of time and you haven’t been successful – eating more real food might be your answer. Maybe you are not feeding your body enough energy for it to burn that extra fat off?

That’s just a thought from some guy who owns a weight loss, personal training gym who also has a Masters in Nutrition and Human Performance (graduated Magna Cum Laude)…but what does he know 😉

There are A LOT more ways you can boost your energy than just those three steps. Let us show you how! On February 5th we will be launching our next challenge where teams of five will compete against each other to see who can change their body fat percent the greatest in 12 weeks. Winning team gets $5,000.00 (that’s not a typo!). We call it our New Year Better You Team Challenge.

Join the challenge, have more energy, lose body fat, make some new friends…and maybe walk away with $1,000.00! Click the link below to read more about it.

Hi, my name is Ben. I am a cancer survivor, blogger, educator and coach. It’s my passion to educate people on health and fitness. The current state of the field is unacceptable to me – overly complicated with too much conflicting information. It’s my goal to help people be as healthy as possible while spending the least amount of time working on it. Work smarter, not harder!

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Having been involved in the fitness industry for over 15 years, we became increasingly frustrated at the poor standards and lack of good customer service in our industry. Frankly we were sick and tired of gyms where sales numbers were more important than member results... read more